Architectural Theory Soundbites

Interior: Dark Space

Junkspace: Junkspace is the interstitial space that is seemingly inadvertently created through the layering of surfaces. Junkspace pushes the individual through the space, to move, to consume, to be consumed, to relinquish mental capacity; all becomes one, all inherits the quality of nothingness within Junkspace.

Mimicry: Mimicry in the natural world occurs when an organism evolves to resemble its surroundings or another organism. This evolution occurs to ensure survival of the organism, life-giving, but it also can be life-taking, in that an organism loses personality as it loses what differentiates it from its surroundings.

Entropy: Entropy is the process of moving from order to disorder. As entropy moves out from the center, emptyness increases within the center, creating antimatter, or negative space. 

"I know where I am, but I do not feel as though I'm at the spot where I find myself. To these dispossessed souls, space seems to be a devouring force. Space pursues them, encircles them, digests them in a gigantic phagocytosis. It ends by replacing them. Then the body separates itself from thought, the individual breaks the boundary of his skin and occupies the other side of his senses. He tries to look at himself from any point whatever in space. He feels himself becoming space, dark space where things cannot be put. He is similar, not similar to something, but just similar. And he invents spaces of which he is "the convulsive possession." (Caillois, Mimicry and Legendary Psychaesthenia)

 

"Junkspace is post-existential: it makes you uncertain where you are, obscures where you go, dismantles where you were. Who are you? You thought that you could ignore Junkspace. Visit it surreptitiously, treat it with condescending contempt or enjoy it vicariously. Because you could not understand it, you've thrown away the keys... but now your own architecture is infected, has become equally smooth, all-inclusive, continuous, warped, busy..." (Koolhaas, Junkspace)

 

"The physical confinement of the dark box-like room indirectly conditions the mind. Even the place where you buy your ticket is called a "box-office." The lobbies are usually full of box-type fixtures like the soda-machine, the candy counter, and telephone booths. Time is compressed or stopped inside the movie house, and this in turn provides the viewer with an entropic condition. To spend time in a movie house is to make a "hole" in one's life." (Smithson, Entropy and the New Monuments)

There are spaces for which the sum is not equal to the total of the parts--the sum is so much less that it becomes a subtraction. It can be called dark space, junkspace, or negative space, and it takes rather than gives. The space has no coherent gestalt, and it envelopes its contents so that they, too, mimic the surroundings and become bland, uniform, continuous, and personality-less. It is the anti-élan vital.